Kamby Bolongo Mean River named one of 25 Important Books of the 2000s by HTML Giant

KBMR was named one of 25 Important Books of the decade byHTML Giant. And was a Page One selection of New & Noteworthy Books by Poets & Writers Magazine.

Thursday, October 20, 2011

No news today - Guest Post - Meredith Walters

The Scribe’s Umbrella

In such a season as recalls the sun, an ashtray full of pennies,a visit to a widow leads you to wonder:virtue and integrity, the effort to be a great manamong bouts of neuralgia, neurosis, the rum someone slipped in your soda for which you do not remember asking,to take suitable decisions—where is it true to say you live, when lions pace elsewhere, terrificand recalled from memory? A river of wine, a river of honey,a river that sings: do not ask what is suffered elsewhere.A bridge over the river to the Bronx.

In such a season,two kids in a sort of strange song and dance in the vestibuleof their mother’s bank lead you to wonderhow a tune might begin that praises a widow who never touches herdead husband’s books. A sculpture unearthed again depicts a scribe with his case and absent stylus but does not metethe hours that passed from task to task.What sign to make among disbelievers? You have been calledby a singer unseen and such is your naturethat even the spaces between questions calls to you.

An apocryphal lion roams the Venetian landscape.It roams St. Petersburg, it roams the Bronx.Your advisors despite the distance of an era awaitingexcavation only suggest what it might be liketo leave and not to abandon yourself. Apprentice the hands to the violinto forge a memory,to strike a path, to be your passage from uncertainty, like building a wingon a building.

In such a season as a woman in furs puts her poodle in a cabthe scribe amends the story to end:“And they were terrified.”The effortless gesture, the trained arm, the hand is a voice.The hand enthroned.Fear and fearfulness. What you know to beyour left ventricle, where a violin awaits the accompanimentof a provisional composition, as compassion—what is suffered elsewhere.What the river is like, what the war is like, what doubt is like.The bravery to say happiness in a dark age.We are merciless in our regrets.

Thought and thinking.A table of friends who do not know where to begin their renditionsof all they fear they allowed to let pass.The time spent thinking, time wasted being afraid,knowing and responsibility, idea and mind,thought and unknown, an actual umbrella. Friend, have you too been abandoned?And if so by what?

Should you, a scribe among contemporaries record them as heroesof mystical texts?Their fingers aren’t god.The great permissions, the great restraints. First the songs,then the theories.You recover your questions:How can the water of a lake be both clear and blue?Have you dreamt the white flag?To make distinctions in darkness.A song whose only words are every way to say no. An involuntary memory.You praise the clear darkness.To say no to every question is triumphant.

A great man once said, “Fresh Kills is a collage.”A great man once said, “The mind is a mechanized Atlantic.”To call on the widow of a great manto be an apprentice, a scribe, to be a great man,to be unable.How you are seen by someone with your back toward herin a bath of sunlightyou would be too shy to accept should you realize its presence.And instead you turn your son’s attention to his shadow.

When the widow utters instructions for surviving a warand likens death to bread thrown into the sea,you understand that you do not yet know.When your god waves from a bridgefrom which he will not be talked down, the sky unravelsinto a forged Venetian twilightwhere you recover first one idea, then another.The river shall gather its skirts and journey across the lion.You are forgiven.

Meredith Walters curates art and culture programs for the Brooklyn Public Library. Her book, All You Have to Do is Ask, won the Anhinga Prize for Poetry in 2006. Her poems have appeared in Conduit, Spout, Jubilat, Crowd, and Subtropics.

Fiction

About Me

Robert Lopez is the author of two novels, Part of the World and Kamby Bolongo Mean River and a collection of short fiction, Asunder. He has taught at The New School, Pratt Institute, Columbia University, Pine Manor College's Solstice Low-Res MFA Program and was a 2010 Fellow in Fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts.
Email - lopezr@newschool.edu
rcl0831@aol.com